Histories within Histories and an Eye to the Future: An Organizational Ethnography

• In Event: Stepping into the (Cess)Pool While the Water Is Stirring: Deconstructing/Reconstructing Black Pedagogical Activism Narratives

Abstract

In 1937, the Jeanes Foundation merged with the John F. Slater Fund, the Peabody Education Fund, and the Virginia Randolph Fund to form the Southern Education Foundation (SEF), which carries forward the funds’ joint history of school-building and Black educational opportunity first begun in 1867. Today, SEF continues to focus on increasing opportunity and improving outcomes for Black students, carrying on the legacy of its predecessor funds within today’s educational context.

Research Questions/Method

This paper presents an organizational autoethnography (e.g., Herrmann, 2020) of the work of the Southern Education Foundation (SEF). It addresses the following research questions:
1) How has SEF worked to archive and understand Black pedagogical activism in its own history - including the legacies of its predecessor funds – as a complete organizational story, but also as a subset of the broader story of U.S. education history? What challenges and successes have arisen in situating this history?
2) How has SEF worked to deconstruct its history – including some problematic aspects of 19th and early-20th century northern philanthropies working to build Black schools in the South–and to adapt and reconstruct its work within the current U.S. educational context?

Herrmann (2020) notes that “there is no correct way to do organizational autoethnography” (p. 4); rather, approaches to the genre may involve different research styles and can vary in tone between “the analytical, the evocative, and the critical.” In this analysis, we draw on the method both as a way to understand cultural practice within an organizational setting (e.g., Parry & Boyle, 2009) and as an opportunity to take a critical orientation that is both “introspective and retrospective” (Boyle & Parry, 2007, p. 185) for actors and stories that may otherwise be restrained (Frandsen & Pelly, 2020). Our approach to this analysis is both generous and critical, drawing on a range of organizational archives, historical and current work artifacts, and staff reflections to surface challenges but also highlight and privilege justice-focused work.

Findings

Our findings highlight several key themes, including parallel adaptation, or understanding the structuring/situating of current work and present educational challenges through an adaptive lens that links the past and present; constructive narrative, or framing organizational history within the broader educational narrative around present-day educational inequities; and actionable approaches, formative analyses of past work not only as historical fact but with an eye toward clear, sustainable takeaways that inform future work. We conclude that constructing and situating this history is an active, subjective, and continuous process that provides key opportunities for ongoing development and public discourse and address the values and assumptions implied by particular choices within this historical documentation/ communication.

Scholarly Significance

We see this analysis as very significant to the current scholarly conversation around situating educational research within a public narrative, particularly as we work to reconstruct global memories that push back on the re-territorialization of past injustices in service of nationalist rhetoric (e.g., Lim & Rosenhaft, 2021).

Authors

• Max Altman, Southern Education Foundation

• Allison Boyle, Southern Education Foundation, Inc.